All across America, households prepared for Santa Claus by setting out a dish of his favorite late-night snack: Cookies and milk. But an increasing share of households probably set out a glass of soy, almond, or oat milk instead of dairy. Why?

When I was a kid, milk was considered a superfood. Television commercials and other ads featured celebrities sporting milk mustaches -- Harrison Ford, Heidi Klum, Shaquille O'Neal. If you were cool, you drank milk. If you ate a bowl of cereal, you weren't finished until you drank the milk. Did you want a chocolate chip cookie? That's fine, but you're going to drink some milk with it.

But now, people are turning away from milk. According to the Financial Times, dairy milk sales fell 3.5% from 2012 to 2017. What's going on?

In a World of Food Fads, Dairy Milk Is Old News

Because milk is a source of protein, fat, carbohydrates, calcium, and (if fortified) vitamin D, milk is definitely a healthy food, though it was never quite the miracle food that it was portrayed to be in commercials. Ingenious marketing turned milk into a superfood. Alas, as is usually the case, the food fad got old, and now milk is on its way out. In fact, the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that some people (often foodies or animal rights activists) believe that dairy milk is actually bad for you. (It's not.)

The first beneficiary of this shift away from dairy was soy milk. Some people drank it due to lactose intolerance, but others thought that soy milk was the new superfood. (It's not.) But that fad is ending, too. Just like with dairy milk, some foodies are raising the alarm over soy milk, accusing it of being bad for your health. (It's not.) As you probably guessed, the fact that soybeans are genetically modified has helped doom the soy food fad.

So, now, consumers are going crazy over oat milk. But don't worry about missing out. In a year or so, foodies will find a reason to scare people over it. To be safe, you could try cockroach milk. Be forewarned that not just any run-of-the-mill cockroach will do. It needs to be specifically the Pacific Beetle cockroach -- because those cockroaches are magical.

Or, you could just do the sane thing and stick with boring cow's milk.

Dr. Alex Berezow joined the American Council on Science and Health as Senior Fellow of Biomedical Science in May 2016. In December 2018, he became Vice President of Scientific Affairs.

Dr. Berezow is a featured speaker for The Insight Bureau, an international speakers' bureau. He also features twice weekly on the Kirby Wilbur Show, a Seattle area radio program, in a segment called "Real Science with Dr. B."

Dr. Berezow is a prolific science writer whose work has appeared in multiple outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC News, The Economist, Forbes, Scientific American, and USA Today, where he serves as a member of the Board of Contributors. He has authored or co-authored three books: The Next Plague and How Science Will Stop It (2018), Little Black Book of Junk Science (2017), and Science Left Behind (2012), which was an environmental policy bestseller.

Dr. Berezow has spoken to a wide variety of audiences about science, from graduate school seminars and church congregations to national TV and radio programs. Formerly, he was the founding editor of RealClearScience. He holds a Ph.D. in microbiology.

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